Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Mainstream Newspaper Industry is on the Verge of Extinction

The decline in the value of publishing mainstream establishment propaganda is becoming obvious.


Mark Perry writes:
Newspaper Association of America (NAA) last year...suddenly stop[ped] its long-standing practice of reporting quarterly advertising revenue data and switch to releasing only annual data. In a 2013 interview, NAA CEO Caroline Little was quoted as saying that she and the organization’s board decided it was “time to stop beating themselves up four times a year with the negative numbers.”...

It took a half century for annual newspaper print ad revenue to gradually increase from $20 billion in 1950 (adjusted for inflation in 2013 dollars) to $65.8 billion in 2000, and then it took only 12 years to go from $65.8 billion in ad revenues back to less than $20 billion in 2012, before falling further to $17.3 billion last year.

Even when revenues from digital advertising and other categories described by the NAA as “niche publications, direct marketing and non-daily publication advertising” are added to print ad revenue (see red line in chart), the combined total revenues for print, digital and other advertising last year was still only $23.56 billion in 2013 dollars, which was the lowest amount of annual ad revenue since 1954, when $23.3 billion was spent on print advertising alone...

The dramatic decline in newspaper ad revenues since 2000 has to be one of the most significant and profound Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction in the last decade, maybe in a generation. And it’s not even close to being over. A 2011 IBISWorld report on “Dying Industries” identified newspaper publishing as one of ten industries that may be on the verge of extinction in the United States.

10 comments:

  1. Good.

    "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." --Thomas Jefferson

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  2. One might speculate that the fervent defenders of the welfare state will decide that a little subsidy to the pen priests will be a wise investment for the state. The state needs ways to prove its legitimacy.

    Would it be beyond the political class to want to run a newspaper? They will argue the bromide that newspapers are a "public good" to be paid for by the public. Of course, if it were truly a good for the public they wouldn't be going broke.

    Big journalism advocates the theft of productive money for the empire all the time, so why shouldn't they get on the dole?

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  3. All those dying industries would be revived if we got rid of fractional reserve banking. The horse and buggy repairman would even come back.

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    1. He he. State run frack banking is to dead companies like Dr. Frankenstein is to dead...corpses. I wonder if private frack banking is different from the state version...

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    2. More amazing economic wisdom from JWTroll. Truly, the depths of your insight knows no bounds. Perhaps you should start your own blog so all your fans from this one could follow your every thought. Your brilliance is lost among the rabble here. Pearls before swine, etc.

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  4. This could be fixed easily.
    They could start do real reporting of the unbiased truth and investigating topics instead of reprinting government press releases. They could start grilling government office holders, asking difficult questions and putting them on the spot. They could start covering real meaningful topics in depth.

    If they did these things they could save their businesses. They choose not to.

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    Replies
    1. Was thinking the same exact thing and that goes for TV news as well.

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  5. As long as the FED prints currency, State Puppets will print newspapers.
    . Whether or not decent intelligent people will read them is another matter.

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